How your email marketing campaigns could seriously damage your business.

Learn how sending emailing campaigns to your unverified contact list could badly hurt your business and impact your reputation.

The rise of email marketing

In less than a generation, email has replaced regular post on many fronts, allowing for faster, larger, borderless communication. Individuals send and receive hundreds of emails on a daily basis (according to Campaign Monitor, a whooping 300 billion emails are being sent on a daily basis worldwide!), and I can't think of a single day where I don't receive at least a bunch of them. This results in a huge amount of contacts building up over time. While this may not be a problem for individuals, corporations and email marketers need to be extra careful about it, as emails = business, and bad emails = bad business.

Email marketing is definitely one of the top channels for sales, traffic, and engagement, with an incredible average return on investment of 4,000%!

If you are not hitting this target, then there is definitely something that you are doing wrong!

While I could list a long list of reasons why your email list is not performing as it should, it most of the time goes down to one thing: the quality of your email contacts. And the quality of your contacts depends on the following:

1. How you built your emailing list (never ever buy an email list, or grab one readily available on the internet). Following best-practice email list building ensures your audience is engaged and potentially interested in the product, information or service you offer.
2. Is every single of your email reaching a single identified individual, which means that it should not contain any of the followings:

• non-existent emails
• spam traps
• distribution or role-based emails
• syntax errors

So what are the steps to help you clean up your emailing list? 

The one important hygienic practice you must make a routine for your email list is email verification.

What is email verification?

Email verification, or email validation, is a process in which you check the accuracy and quality of each contact of your list. Email verification will give a status to each email telling you to what degree it is safe to use. 

Different services have different level of details, from a simple 3-tier result (valid, failed, unknown) to an in-depth analysis of why and what degree it succeeded, failed or returned an unsure result (for instance, invalid answer of the SMTP server, relaying problems, anti-spam technology blocking the pingback, DNS error, syntax error, etc).

Based on those results, you can then decide how to deal with each contact: whether to continue using them, remove them from your list or put them on hold, for example for manual verification.

Why should you get your emailing list verified?

Very often due to lack of time (or rather, improper time allocation), ignorance, or carelessness, companies and individual marketers tend to completely skip this verification process. But getting your list verified is simple, easy and has a hefty amount of benefits.

1. Increase quality

The quality of your business should reflect on the quality of your data, and vice-versa.

Having your emailing list regularly checked is also a KPI that you can use to check whether you or your team are collecting meaningful customer information. A large number of defective emails is a sign that you should not only look at your list but also at your data collection process and the people who collect them. 

Data quality is key to your business success. According to Experian:

94 percent of organizations “suffer from common data errors”. The most common data errors are:

Incomplete or missing data – 55%

Out-dated information – 45%

Duplicate data – 43%

Typos – 32%

Rest assured this is also happening at your company level.

2. Reduce bounces

Bounces are harmful.

First, because you spend time and resources in a piece of communication that, at the end, doesn't reach its intended recipient. And you will spend additional time cleaning your inbox cluttered by the bounced messages.

Second, and especially if you are using email services such as AWeber or MailChimp, bounces count towards your rating as a seller, and your subscription is based on the number of emails you hold on your list. Yes, you pay even for the invalid emails of your contact list.

Last but not least, mass-mailing from a unique IP address with a significant amount of bounces originated from a single SMTP server could get your IP graylisted or even blocked, which is something you certainly don't want to achieve.

Reducing the bounces works towards the cost optimization of your list. If your bounce rate is over 2%, you should start getting really worried about it.

3. Reduce spam

The three most common ways to have your email flagged as spam are: a) the recipient didn't voluntarily subscribe and agree to receive your email (in which case you need to review the best-practice for email acquisition in your company); b) the recipient is a role-based address (for example sales1@ or info@ addresses); c) the address is a spam trap (email address inserted in a list with the sole purpose of catching spam - any email sent to that specific address will automatically be marked as spam and the sender reported and black-listed).

We won't emphasize enough the importance of quality, even when it comes to data collection. While email verification cannot fix your intrinsic quality issues, it can certainly help in identifying and rectifying those role-based emails that can easily get you flagged.

4. Manage your reputation

The increasing number of email scams, spamming, phishing and other threats have lead to much better controls over email exchange, with servers getting more and more performant filters, and also being more inclined to flag your email as "spam" if something doesn't look right.

When you have repeated deliverability issues, ISPs and ESPs will start focusing on your account and, depending on the number and frequency of issues, could flag you as a spammer. Once you are considered a spammer, more and more of the emails you send (including to a clean verified list), will end up in your recipients' spam folder. That means that even your best client – who was always pressing that "buy" button in each and every email of yours – will not get your communication in his inbox anymore, because you will have the reputation of a spammer. And once you reach that stage, you can say farewell to your return on investment for your email marketing campaigns!

Just like quality, reputation is key when it comes to business success.

5. Get the numbers right

The accuracy of your metrics and the resulting analysis very much depend on how accurate your list is. Indeed, cleaning your contact list will mean a leaner list and fewer number of contacts, which may look bad to your management depending on how you present it to them. However, once you get a clean list, the data you can extract from your campaigns will start to become really meaningful.

And because you will then be able to make more sense of your data, your actions will, therefore, be focused on real customers, which in turn will translate in increased customer satisfaction.

To get more insights, please feel free to read this article on 70 email markerting stats you need to know.

6. Support your sales teams

Every year, between 1/4 to 1/3 of email addresses become obsolete. Yes, you read it right: that's almost one-third of all emails worldwide. As your emailing list grows, it becomes more difficult and time-consuming to manage. You are getting different tiers of clients: prospects, repeat customers, unsatisfied customers... which all require different processes and actions.

By getting a verified list, your salesforce can optimize their work in order to be more efficient and you know that their work is targeted at converting real individuals into happy customers. 

7. Increase ROI

With a leaner list that contains clearly identified individuals, it means that you will be sending less emails and that you will be getting a higher response rate. It will also mean that the individual value of your customers (and their email address) will increase.

It is common sense indeed, but worth repeating as many of you reading this article will never have had performed verification of their emailing list.

In conclusion

While you could just keep on sending your promotions, updates or birthday wishes to your list without caring much, it wouldn't make much business sense to decide to save a few hundred bucks for a process that can reduce your bounce rate up to 99%, increase your productivity and brand image, and help you (re)focus on quality and best-practice.

Now the cost of the process is really marginal; it costs literally a few hundred bucks to get an emailing list of 1 million addresses verified. You can check by yourself on this e-mail verification service found on eBay: http://bit.ly/verifemail.

While I can understand some may be reticent to hand over their full client list to a stranger, there are a few safety steps that can make the whole process secure, make the list useless for anyone else but you, and protect your interests:

• Best-practice protects you. Anyone stealing your list and using it would most probably get flagged as a spammer.
• Extract the emails from your list, and send them for verification (sort your list alphabetically from the email column, select the email column, copy, and paste in a new document. Save and send the new document for verification). A list with nothing but emails is not worth much. And your customer data privacy remains safe.
• Include spam traps. You can add one (or preferably more) email addresses in your list exclusively created to monitor who is using the list. If that email gets any message, you can take immediate action with full information on the sender.

For more information on email verification, please feel free to leave your question in the comments below, or contact me directly via LinkedIn messaging.